by Cynthia Lucy Stephens

As libraries get weeded and traditional printed books get culled, as modern electronic books get pirated by corporate behemoths for AI training, a symbolic figure in the fight against this destruction of a civilization is Jorge Luis Borges, the writer from Buenos Aires who once imagined Paradise as a library.  

Borges described the importance of his father's library to his childhood:

‘At home, both English and Spanish were commonly used. If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father's library.’

"The library of Babel"

The Times recently ran a leader entitled “Shelf Life” which starts with a description of Borges’s story “The Library of Babel”, in which the universe is a library containing all possible books, including those which are gibberish. This malign library is not possible as a physical space. The Times writer draws comparisons with British university libraries, which are running out of space, and describes a scheme to free up the shelves.  Managed book culling by libraries and individuals is seen as a necessity, and we are told: “You are not involved in the destruction of the Library of Alexandria.”  I certainly wish I could agree with this optimistic conclusion.

Borges’s biographer Edwin Williamson describes this dark fable written in 1941 thus: “the universe is compared to a library where mankind searches in vain for an overall purpose to the vast, geometric edifice in which it is trapped.”

Another biographer James Woodall writes of “the nightmarish vision of infinity” of ‘The Library of Babel’: “In it, books have taken a paranoiac revenge on the humanity which purports to use them for understanding the universe they, the books, are meant to explicate.”  (https://ejlw.eu/article/view/42254)

Who was Borges?

Jorge Luis Borges was born in 1899 in the centre of old Buenos Aires. His mother, Leonor Acevedo, had an old criollo Argentine lineage. His father, Jorge Guillermo Borges, was half Argentine and half English.  Borges did not attend school for most of his childhood, as the Palermo neighbourhood was considered too rough, but he had an English nanny and access to his father's library, with thousands of English and French books. 

The family went to Europe in 1914 to seek help for problems with father's failing eyesight, and they got caught unawares when the First World War broke out. They moved to Geneva, where Borges attended school and learned French, German and Latin. After the war the family moved between Spain and Buenos Aires for around ten years, then they settled back definitively.  In 1938 Borges got his first full-time job, as a library assistant.  

Borges's life and work

In the 1940s Borges's canonical stories were widely published, including Ficciones (Fictions) and El Aleph (The Aleph). Borges suffered from advancing congenital blindness, which reached its inevitable conclusion as his status as a writer soared. In 1946, when Perón became President, Borges lost his job at the municipal library. However, with Perón's downfall in 1955 he was appointed director of the prestigious Argentine National Library. In 1961, after winning the Formentor Prize for Literature he quickly became an international icon.

Borges wrote a short story set in Toledo, Spain, about the art of magic, which is partly set in a subterranean library. This story 'El brujo postergado' involves the Dean of Santiago and the Sorcerer don Illán of Toledo. The wizard tests the Dean, making him wait for his partridge supper, leading him down stone steps towards a cell almost underneath the river Tagus, into a library, and a laboratory with magical instruments, where he tricks him. Borges indicates that his story derives from one by the Infante don Juan Manuel, who took it from an Arabic book. Toledo had a reputation as the centre for occult sciences, and for a famous school of translations, so Borges is drawing on these traditions here. 

I first read Borges while living in Toledo when I taught English there, after graduating from Newcastle University. That was the period of Spain's Transition to Democracy, and I was living in Toledo when the historic vote on the Constitution occurred in 1978.

Cynthia Lucy Stephens is the author of The Borges Enigma (Tamesis, 2021).

She is also the author of Circles around Borges (2025). Edwin Williamson, author of Borges, A Life, describes it thus: "A fascinating book. Cynthia Stephens has gathered a wealth of interesting and varied material which amply justifies the core idea of "circling" around Borges. It brings out the breadth and depth of the man’s literary hinterland and the sheer power of his imagination."

Books: https://boydellandbrewer.com/book/the-borges-enigma-9781855663497/?v=7885444af42e

Cambridge Core:  https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/borges-enigma/204FEC3918134B5275C834040AEB7895

Hardback printed copies of Circles around Borges have currently found a home in number of UK libraries, for which she is profoundly grateful. For further information please email the author: [email protected]

(Society of Authors profile: https://societyofauthors.org/soa-member/cynthia-lucy-stephens/)